UnderGrid Network Services

Okay… So I am all for using technology, but using it simply for the sake of using it and then being completely stupid in how you use it is another story all together. I’m not a political activist, nor do I enjoy political bantering. I try to stay as far away from the political arena as possible as it never turns out good. Now I understand California is a very progressive state and makes a lot of trends which are then later seen across the country. Furthermore, I know Santa Clara County is right in the heart of Silicon Valley where much of the tech industry thrives. That however does not mean that I want to get email with the subject “A personal note” from some candidates wife trying to elicit my vote for her husband.

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So yesterday evening I got to eat a little crow and go back on a stance I’ve been taking for the past decade. It wasn’t too bad, maybe a little salty, but it taught me yet again to be careful when I say I’ll never do something. I’m talking of course about my saying “I will never use a cable modem service” as I’ve been a loyal DSL customer since the late ’90s now. Last night we ran by BestBuy and picked up a Motorola SURFboard eXtreme Broadband Cable Modem (SB6120) and then home to call Comcast to add high-speed internet to our existing cable service. Less than 30 minutes later we were surfing over cable rather than DSL.

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Usually in the past I’ve done my web hosting on either one of the many servers I own or utilizing VPS hosting providers like VPSfarm.com, GrokThis.net or Linode.com, but lately with the economy and a price that can’t be beat I’ve been using Web.com‘s Linux Hosting plan to meet my needs. This has met all my requirements except one, I couldn’t run my Ruby on Rails applications that I was working on development for using their services. Well until now that is… Thanks in part to a great Systems Engineer that I’ve had the pleasure of working with and knowing great strides had been made to improve the feature set to the level that a power user like myself would appreciate adding even more value to the offering.

Recently there had been work being done to add FastCGI access to the Linux Hosting plan which already offers PHP5, Python 2.4 and Perl 5. Ruby is still not available on the system as a whole; however, that doesn’t stop you from adding it to your own account which is precisely what I did. Armed with the ability to test out FastCGI I proceeded to work on getting a very simple test RoR app setup and running.

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So as an independent consultant in this tough economy I take projects as they come along, regardless of the content. In this recent instance I took on a adult-oriented content site, Alternative Haven, and had setup a PayPal donation link. Now I had been a PayPal user since way back in 2000 shortly after PayPal sprung into existence in 1999. I was very careful to read the User Agreement and the Acceptable Use Policy and have not had any cause for alarm since then. Between 2000 and 2004 I was receiving payments fairly regularly while I ran a LiveJournal-clone site called UnderGrid Journals, but those payments ceased when the site was taken down in early ’04. Since then it has been used regularly by me to pay for conference tickets and also my wonderful Xen VPS hosting service through VPSFarm.com.

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So we’re currently working on an adult-oriented website in Ruby on Rails. The project is pretty daunting so we’re looking for potential assistance in putting some of the pieces together.

If you have any Rails experience, are interested and don’t have a problem working on an adult-oriented website then please get in touch with a sample of your work. Given the nature of the site and the fact it is in stealth development mode we have to be vague on the details at this time.

Taking GNU Privacy Guard key usage seriously I have had a published key usage policy that I embed the link into any GPG key signature when signing a key. After years of using PGP/GPG I have found that having an established usage and management policy is nice as it lets others know that you take your key usage seriously.

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So I’ve got this serious jonesing love/hate relationship with spam. Personally I’d love to collect all the spammers of the world in a nice lead lined room and irradiate them with low yield nuclear waste. Not enough to kill them note you, just enough to ensure that they don’t breed!

There are so many methods out there to try and curb the amount of spam out there but never seems to be enough adoption of them. I try my best to implement what I can as I’ve fallen victim of several “joe jobs” in the past. As a result of that I looked at Sender Policy Framework (SPF) before it got introduced into the IETF track and became spf2.0/mfrom,pra. I’m still running my spf1 classic records and it has helped a bit, but I wonder just how many servers really bother to check and honor the policies published.

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So we had to go and rebuild the servers, as a side affect this means our old blog site is currently not been restored. Please continue to check back as we should have it fully restored and improved soon. There are lots of things happening behind the scenes and this will be the place to find out all about them.